PPS

PPS used to stand for Pirates of Puget Sound, possibly the first organized hacker bbs's in Seattle, apart from Eskimo North, which was a more main stream. PPS was run by Dan Cassipo, who's main business was making italian sausage (still does, visit Ballard and say hi).

The system was written in Pascal, and at it's heyday was running on 6 Apple II+/IIe systems, all with their own single line (300/1200) dialins.

After a while, PPS gained a bit much noteriety, so made a (failed) attempt to change it's acronym to "Polynet Public Systems".

PPS, like many other boards of the time, were set up like a text adventure game. you wandered around, read messages, and occasionally got your ass kicked (thrashed was the proto hacker slang). You did gain experience points, and gold, so eventually you could buy stuff. the only stuff really worth buying was accesss, so you could get wares.